It’s not even a matter of whether Mark Emmert should be out as president of the NCAA. Of course he should, one way or another, for all the improprieties (a favorite NCAA enforcement-type word) he’s committed, not just the ones in this botched University of Miami investigation.

In his own words on Monday, it’s the NCAA executive committee. That is, one particular group of the school presidents who make up the NCAA. The same school presidents who invented the NCAA, and who laid down the laws it ignored, flouted and broke in the guise of enforcing them against Miami.

They’re the ones who will stand in judgment of Mark Emmert. People like Donna Shalala, Miami’s president, who now doesn’t like the way the organization in which she helps rule handles its business with her school.

And people like the former president of Penn State, Graham Spanier, who wielded enormous power in the NCAA for years in defense of its principles, and whose name is now linked for eternity with Jerry Sandusky’s. Spanier, of course, isn’t there anymore, what with the whole awaiting trial on state felony charges and all.

These people made the NCAA what it is. They handed the keys to Emmert. On his watch, the NCAA is hitting what may be its moral and ethical low. Now, these folks are in position to move him out and move another of their own into the position.

To do … what, exactly?

To get things back to normal, meting out NCAA justice in a world they created to benefit themselves and nobody else, and apparently peeking over their shoulders occasionally to see which among them they can and cannot trust.

These are presidents of our nation’s universities doing this, it must be repeated. Their conduct on behalf of the NCAA, involving the students on their campus who play football and basketball – and whom they still insist they are committed to educating – would be absolutely unacceptable if it involved any other group of students at their schools.

The NCAA itself is a complete abdication of what school presidents should be charged to do. That charge is a long, complex list, but most certainly it doesn’t include “rolling over for whoever pays us the most money, and crushing our principles and students along the way.”

And the athletes are students, of course. The NCAA was created as a way to ensure those same revenue-producing entities are not classified as “employees.” School presidents wanted it this way. How noble.

Their highest responsibility, it stands to reason, should be the best interests of the students. Here’s what that means, in their minds, just to take this one Miami example alone – sneaking a lawyer for the person accusing the school of impropriety into their investigation of the school, and hiding the payment for it, to help find dirt on the school.

Shalala, Miami’s president, believes this entitles her to get on a soapbox, rail against the NCAA and dare it to keep chasing after her athletic program. All her righteous anger, of course, distracts observers from noticing that a convicted felon, Nevin Shapiro, hung around her football and basketball players, under her nose … or maybe not under her nose.

Not to mention, noticing that this again has to do with those players getting money they are not “supposed” to be getting, according to NCAA rules, of course (which Shalala, the former U.S. secretary for Health and Human Services under President Clinton, willingly signed off on, because she’s, you know, part of the NCAA).

Seriously, a former cabinet member making and enforcing the guidelines of the NCAA, which include both punishing players for “improper” payments and negotiating $11 billion TV contracts for the basketball tournament?

That’s as funny as Spanier, the former head of the NCAA board of directors and the man accused of leading a cover-up for a serial child molester, being a published author, essayist and founder of the “Journal of Family Issues.”

Back to Shalala, though. She calls what the NCAA did in its investigation of her school “not liv(ing) up to their own core principles.” The NCAA never tires of explaining its principles to everybody within earshot. Its practices are another story, entirely.

As presidents, they essentially say, we may safeguard the welfare, integrity and development of most of our students, but the ones who play ball are here to make us rich, and whatever we can do to keep them poor at the same time is fair game.

For what it’s worth, this is what this group of the highest-ranking officials of our country’s institutions of higher education says about itself and its role in running intercollegiate sports (according to ncaa.org):

“The NCAA is a presidentially led organization. The Executive Committee is responsible for hiring and evaluating the NCAA president, for budgetary oversight and for establishing Association-wide policy. Presidential groups also lead each division in the form of the Division I Board of Directors, the Division II Presidents Council and the Division III Presidents Council.”

So this is on them. They have oversight over themselves. Forcing Emmert out is useless, except to give them all cover for what they have allowed to happen.

If they really wanted to carry out the loftiest ideals their universities (and their own positions there) represent, they would abolish the NCAA itself. Today.

It’s an abomination. Every one of the presidents who make it up is living proof of it. That includes Shalala and Emmert, two sides of the same filthy coin.